


Shape of a leaf

by faceofstone



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Yeesha's surrealist Age-writing, a moment of understanding, two lifetimes of differences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 11:03:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faceofstone/pseuds/faceofstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frayed and pliable, and rotting, and when it falls, it will be on solid rock. Esher and Yeesha and the only trait they've ever shared: a penchant for failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shape of a leaf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Capella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capella/gifts).



> I was thrilled to match on Myst and I hope this fic works for you! I hope you have a great exchange!  
> I always wonder about the evolution of Yeesha and Esher's relationship, so here is one possible step, set years before Myst 5.

  
  


It barely feels like waking up, these days. Esher opens his eyes to the flicker of fire marbles, scratches his beard, rolls over and drifts off again. He got a glimpse of Ae'gura far outside the window, a marvel sitting atop the dull, wounded lake, and it looks real enough, but then again, so do his dreams. Used to be that when he got to see the City it was full of noise and chatter, splatters of vibrant colors reflected on the buildings' polished stones. In the corner of his eye, he could feel the void catching up, but in front of him D'ni still sparked to life, enough for him to walk through the old streets and feel his heart swell. That was then. Ever since the Tablet slipped from his hold, even his worst nightmares tiptoe on empty pavements, with the beasts' perverted linking gaining an echo in the void of the ruined halls.

Base needs get him to leave his cot. A drink will lull him back just fine.

  
  


Outside the room he claimed for himself some _vailee_ ago, close to the pile of rubble that used to be his house, a linking book has appeared. Old pages, fresh ink. He does not stop to check the writing beyond the verdant linking panel. If they were filled with good, solid D'ni words, he could not understand enough of them to get a glimpse of the Age they describe and, what is worse, a knot in his throat says he would only find an expanse of nonsense and symbols in their stead.

  
  


There is only one possible sender and as far as invitations go, Esher has seen subtler and classier displays from giggling schoolboys. _Child._ Spoiled child. Yet stuck between a rock and a hard place, solitude as opposed to the company of the evasive, entitled wench who dared to give him hope and then stripped it all from him, the choice is disarmingly simple.

Esher gives a deep sigh from the bottom of his lungs – may the whole City be witness to this nuisance – and puts his hand forward.

  
  


No link backs. No link backs! A perfunctory search shows no books in clear sight of the clearing that has welcomed him and Esher holds onto the dried leather on his shoulder until his knuckles turn white, ears booming with the crash of tidal waves against porous rocks and the offended calls of seabirds. This isn't sand under his feet. This isn't another Noloben, he tells himself unclenching his teeth. He knows that the brat has managed to bend the beasts' will to her needs and does not need books to get around, and he knows that she knows that he also bent the beasts' bodies to the same effect, but still, what savage would be so disrespectful to a guest. She should have have known etiquette, she should have known him – the knot in his throat loosens all the same.

  
  


A single path goes deep into the mesh of fused stone and metal that the linking image had shown as a forest, skeletal columns jutting up. What life there is remains on the surface, as a coat of moss and creepers claims the framework as its domain. Even when Esher reaches the source of a noise, he sees nothing, touched only by the faintest feeling of a presence, as if all motion in the Age took place behind deep curtains that his senses are not honed to discern. A quick call, a rattling of leaves.

  
  


The following clearing possesses the intimacy and quiet of a cave, with a single ring of sky - a deep and distant blue, heavy with violet hues – bared high up above his head. Humid vines drop from the crags; the jagged surface underneath looks like an embroidery from a distance, and from up close, like nothing at all. Light filters from the cracks in the frayed wall up ahead. Underneath it, Yeesha sits on the ground, surrounded by stones, and traces symbols on the back of her hand with a dark paste. It is the last trickle in a downpour of ink that has come down the right side of her face, enveloping her chin and neck and shoulder and arm. Esher looks away: if those markings are meant as an act of communication, it sure as granite is not meant for him. It never is, why was he expecting anything to change after the – cue audience laughter – necessary pause in their business relationship. He failed, outliving his purposefulness in her eyes, she disappeared from his existence. Esher wishes the disappointment in her eyes would stop stinging in the back of his memory.

  
  


“You have come. Shared defeat is a solid place for a beginning. Dark and formless, it begets its rules.”

That sure is a greeting, and by then, Esher has long mastered the worn-out eye roll (used to be, he could lend an interested ear for entire _tahvo_. Many things went up in smoke along with the Tablet). He walks closer, crossing his arms and squaring his shoulders, still looking anywere but at the markings on her skin. There are good D'ni letters mixed in there, he knows, and he would scrub them off her tan surface face. He better turn a blind eye.

“Ah, the naked truth! You are lonely”, he says. Far shot, as far as interpreting hogwash on the spot goes, but then again, it takes one to know one.

“So are you.” Yeesha drops her ink and turns her neck to stare at him, long unbraided hair falling on her shoulders. She cocks her head. “But Releeshahn, the Whole, where paths of stone join in circles, is open to you.”

“No less than to the daughter of its writer.”

“True.” She raises an eyebrow, amused. Takes one to know one. “Yet the water's flow is as unbridled as it is guided by the permeability of the ground that makes its bed.”

“I don't know what that means. But look at you: you will not return in shame, because you are hiding here like a wounded animal, a desert bird nursing her little cramped wings, you cling to your pride and yet you would have _me_ end my days unseen and unappreciated, with no ink nor pen to offer.” He taps his fingers on the washed-out fabric of his tunic. “I will rejoin my kin when I can carry with me the Book to a lit-up Cavern. No sooner.”

Esher means it. Visions of grandeur are all he has left, if he is to put one foot in front of the other and carry on he needs his goal to be noble and bright, designing for himself a higher purpose than the plain refuge the blood of Ti'ana has to offer.

Esher also fully intended to tick her off, as the flimsiest mentions of nobility and brightness have the power to, and nods to himself as talking of a luminous D'ni gets her to drop her ink and clench hew jaw. Small victories. But she must have learned her lesson, changed her bets (talking to her always feels like a game of strategy played under a veil, with time-worn pieces one can only discern by touch and rules unknown), because the chastisement he was expecting doesn't come. Instead, she says:

“Failure blinds and binds... I, too, have shackles to break before I can rest. And I believed – yes I believed, through my grand-grandmother's fault I believed – that the Tablet had taken pity of the blood on your hands and offered the Slates' coarse surface to cleanse it. But that blood got behind your eyelids, made itself invisible. As I cannot see what rests behind mine. What remains is blindness. This Age, I feel, is for the blind, a resting stop where new perspective is found. I wrote it long ago, to reflect upon the quest after the Tablet closed itself off to me.”

So that's what a backhanded offer of cooperation sounds like. He's heard worse, though there are fumes still hanging onto his brain that might be padding the more pungent echoes of this meeting.

“See.”

Yeesha jumps to the ground from her makeshift throne and blows a noncommittal puff on the drying ink on the back of her hand, stretching her fingers and curling them according to a silent musical pattern. She stays still. Then in a swoop, and Esher is sure he only blinked once, she is propped up on the rocky wall behind her, climbing toward a breach some feet up, violet light tinging her hair. She points to her right, where a gentler slope reaches another breach, inviting him to follow and take a look.

Outside the shelter of their moss-encrusted metal protrusions, a vast plain stretches to the horizon. This sun's livid light strikes Esher as the most artificial element of it all. A naked pylon towers over the grass, proud, it seems, with deep engravings. Far beyond it, vast ruins – layers of walls, and vines, and moss. Harsh, dark, saturated colors.

“Look.”

  
  


Layers of walls, and vines, and moss. And once again the distinct feeling of curtains closed shut on the reality of the scene. In the moment he shuts his eyes, a procession of ghosts guards the dead city. When he opens them again, those walls are the natural result of fractions and contractions of ancient molten rocks. A shadow flickers, impossibly large on the distant walls.

  
  


“I looked.”

“So you saw.”

“I did not-”

“Think of the one branch that grows now, the leaf it carries. D'ni is gone from D'ni's grasp, it shall- ah, the words are” - she hesitates, tracing the ink patterns on her skin - “ _can a dead tree grow again? The rain starts and the tree will grow, but are you the one to start it?_ It grows, a circle grows in spirals it always grows.”

There is a wind blowing from the plains; Esher shakes his head.

“You and your gardening.”

“It was dreamt before I saw it written.”

And those writings were read by a thousand wise men and she believes to have found the key, but there is no point in arguing, no point in letting this defeat take roots, no point... Beyond the curtains, Esher only sees a gentle lake reflecting the lights of home.

“I'll tend to the stone.”

  
  


She refuses to speak more, or can't. Hard to say. He leaves first, as darkness falls. Behind the cracks, collecting on trails cut between sharp grass blades, there is rain.

 

 


End file.
